Pavlovian partisanship

The GOP is screwing Romney

AS GOVERNOR of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney passed health-care legislation that mandated the purchase of a health-insurance policy, under the threat of a monetary penalty. That's how Obamacare works, too. Mr Romney's delicate federalist argument against Obamacare, perfected during the primaries, was that health-care reform ought to be state-based, that an individual mandate is perfectly acceptable at the state level, but at the national level represents an unconstitutional abuse of congressional regulatory power under the commerce clause. The Supreme Court said that the commerce clause needn't have anything to do with it. As long as the penalty aspect of the mandate is conceived as a tax, all is well, constitutionally.

Following the Obamacare ruling, the Romney campaign predictably said that it does not see the penalty as a tax, and remains in its conviction that the mandate is unconstitutional on commerce-clause grounds. Signing on to John Roberts' reasoning in the decision would have implied that the court did not decide the case incorrectly, that Romneycare imposed a tax on uninsured Bay Staters, and that there is, after all, no principled distinction between Romneycare and Obamacare, as the federal government's tax powers aren't in dispute. So, as Brian Beutler of TPM writes:

It shouldn’t have taken Washington’s top Republican operatives more than a few minutes to recognize that attacking the mandate as a tax would put Mitt Romney in an even more uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act than he’s already in and, implicitly, give John Roberts and the Supreme Court a pass on the legal argument.

None of this is much helping Mr Romney. The mandate was unpopular as a penalty and isn't going to become much less popular as a tax. So what's going on? Why were Republicans so eager to push their man into a corner? Part of the problem is that, for all their swagger, movement conservatives are nervous about their ability to win big elections without running against tax increases. David Weigel writes:

Ideally, if you're a modern Republican presidential candidate, you get to run against a candidate who raised taxes. You can promise relief from those taxes. That's why, from a WSJ perspective, Romney so badly needs to frame the Obamacare penalty as a Middle Class Tax Hike. There's no other massive tax hike to run against!

A related but different problem for Mr Romney is that partisans are by nature Pavlovian, and simply can't help drooling when the bell is rung. Republicans heard the dinging of the word "tax" and thoughtlessly went on the attack. As Mr Beutler put it, GOP operatives "saw a shiny object chased after it, and ran roughshod over Romney along the way". And this isn't the only shiny object that has gotten Mr Romney trampled by his own party. Mr Beutler continues:

This seems to happen over and over again. The Obama campaign has been deft at keeping other major stories in the news—from student loans to women’s rights to tax equity to immigration and on and on. It’s all perfect bait for movement conservatives and House and Senate members, and each time they take it you can practically hear the cries of frustration from Boston.

Of course, if Mr Obama prevails in November, conservative true believers will pin the blame on Mr Romney both for failing stay "on message" about the economy and for failing to signal sufficiently conservative zeal on the issues his nominal allies are making it impossible for him to avoid.

"The top 20% of earners in this country are paying nearly half of federal income taxes. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of workers aren't paying any federal income tax. That's FAIR? Give me a break."

The system does appear strikingly unfair, so you have to ask yourself why it is so.

I currently earn $8 per hour in the USA. To put this in context, I earned more money ten years ago as a 16 year old in the UK. As for job security or health benefits, I'm lucky if I'm not fired on the spot and I'm thankful my husband has health insurance through his work.

The fact that 50% effectively pay no taxes illustrates that the rich-poor divide in this country is extreme. With a minimum wage which adds up to around $16,000 per year, a lot of people don't make all that much money, and hence don't pay tax.

I see poverty all around me in the 'richest country in the world'. What upsets me the most is that rich Americans do not feel ashamed about this problem and aren't willing to help their fellow countrymen out by paying them a fair wage and funding a decent education and healthcare system.

Better the GOP "screws" Romney than that Romney gets elected and "screws" the rest of us.

If you want to see what a faith based, corporation friendly, indifferent to the people GOP regime can do, I recommend the following book. It details how this kind of administration
[Bush in the US and his crony, capitalist, loyalist satrapy in Iraq] will screw up.

"Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Britons may be somewhat cheered by the obvious failure of the Bush administration to benefit from the past experiences of the US, the British Empire, and history in general. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is certainly unwise. It often has very negative consequences for innocent bystanders if not for the dimwitted miscreants.

There is no such political animal as a conservative republican in America anymore. The traditional Republican party of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, Dirksen, Hatfield, Ford and some others no longer exists.

Those that wear the Republican label now are Fascists--totalitarian, corrupt, and incompetent that have adopted Hitler and Goebbels Big Lie propaganda--tell lies, even preposterous lies and repeat them over and over to convince, fool and even brainwash the American citizens.

They have a lot of help--Fox Fraudcasting, Limbaugh, Beck, and other Lunatic propagandists, Hate radio-Alex Jones, David Horowitz, and others, Unreal newsprint-Rupert Murdoch's Wall St. Journal and New York Post, Examiner and others, Web sites-Red State, Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc..and thousands upon thousands of sycophant wingnut bloggers that re-post the constant 24/7 messages their miserable failure masters dish out to them.

There are Corporations in America that have become Fascist and they fund the Lunatic Fascists in the so-called Republican party. These radical extremists have no positive political accomplishments and that makes them illegitimate. All they have that saves them is 'Big Lie' propaganda

The tails been wagging the dog for too long with the GOP. People whose paycheck depends on pedaling purity can always seek refuge and another paycheck by throwing the candidates under the bus later on. It's a wild west show. The next great Republican leader won't be someone who checks all the boxes, but someone who can reign in the noise.

Do you folks watch "Inside Washington"?
Informative and entertaining.
Mark Shields and Nina Totenberg on the left,
Evan Thomas of Politico (centrist?),
and Charles Krauthammer on the right.
"I look at the economy and I think there's no way that Barak Obama can be re-elected.
And then I look at Mitt Romney and think there's no way Barak Obama can lose."
-- Mark Shields
NPWFTL
Regards

"I don’t think I can survive another 4 years of Obama, and am certain that our economy won’t."

Is Obama going to nuke the entirety of the US? I'm having a hard time imagining how he could manage to actually completely kill the economy. If he tried really hard maybe he could put the economy in a depression, I suppose.

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that hyperbole is THE WORST THING EVER.

The author writes: “Of course, if Mr Obama prevails in November, conservative true believers will pin the blame on Mr Romney both for failing stay "on message" about the economy and for failing to signal sufficiently conservative zeal on the issues his nominal allies are making it impossible for him to avoid.” Unfortunately that is the result of having the far right of the GOP setting the agenda these days. Attack everyone, label everyone and call them either traitors or un-American. They do that even if their opponent is a Democrat or a Republican that has now become a RINO (Republican in name only). It is sad, because any vibrant democracy needs two well-organized, articulate and rational parties that have fairly distinct views on any one problem, be it a problem regarding the economy, politics, foreign policy or society. (And I add, all societies need a good conservative voice). Unfortunately, this crop of GOP leaders is still fighting the Cold War and, as we see here, even its own candidate.

As President Obama launches his campaign to extend tax cuts for the middle class, he is hopeful of shifting the key economic issues, unemployment and housing markets, to the issue of tax fairness. He is hopeful that the hidden tax implications of Obamacare will be lost via this new political distraction.

There is no question that Chief Justice John Roberts revealed the true facts surrounding the tax increase last week when he asked if “Congress thought of it (Obamacare) as a tax, if they defended it under the tax power, why didn’t they say it was a tax?”

The records show the response from the Obama administration as: “They might have thought, your Honor, that calling it as they did would make it more effective in its objective, but it is in the Internal Revenue Code, it is collected by the IRS on April 15th.”

If the provision appears in the Internal Revenue Code and operates as a tax, it is indeed a tax. Attempting to fool, deceive and/or confuse tax payers is a clear “no confidence” vote getter.

Hopefully, Mitt Romney exposes the revelation that the individual healthcare mandate is indeed a tax and reminds the President of his campaign pledge not to raise middle class taxes.

As a result of Obamacare and many other policy enactments, our economy will continue its downward spiral. The risk equation in our economy is now greater and the prospects of growth revival far lower. We are quickly dismantling our country’s growth engine with these continued massive deficits, regulatory job-destroying burdens, increased governmental entitlements, programs and costs, major tax increase initiatives, bailouts, export driven outsourcing, locked up credit, carried interest and capital gains tax uncertainties. Obamacare being a prime example. All of these elements signal Wall Street capital markets caution and exacerbate our continued high unemployment and housing woes.

With Obamacare, small companies, which make up the majority of our economy are incented to drop health insurance coverage and instead provide employees with a stipend to purchase their own insurance on the open markets. It’s clearly a cost savings for companies to take this route with the justification that employees may be able to get better insurance coverage than the company offered. Of course, we know what happens when 15% of the population is burdened with paying for 85% of its people.

If the Obama administration’s objective is to support full employment, there are far better policies to accomplish this over our current unemployment benefits insurance. The majority of economists concur that unemployment benefits generate additional unemployment, pure and simple. Having the employed pay for extended unemployment entitlements fuels the current depression era sentiment of Wall Street, causing its dire effect on our economy. Stepped decrease and termination of unemployment benefits after a given point is the catalyst to helping people help themselves in securing jobs.

Excessively high tax rates are actually counterproductive and result in de-incentivizing capital investments (key to employment growth), which in turn suppresses governmental tax revenues. Simply put, tax cuts are absolutely key to job creation. Job creation and low unemployment are key to consumer confidence. All of which are key to economic recovery. Tax increases, ala Obamacare, will continue to severely depress the economy and further erode Obama’s dismal recovery attempts.

A prosperous economy is fundamentally all about job creation, productivity and consumer confidence. We need to grow our economy from the Middle class up, not suppress it.

The Obama administration’s focus should be on initiating new tax cuts—not merely extending the current cuts already in place, and certainly not passage of new increases.

Policies geared to boosting mortgage interest deductions, cutting governmental spending, deploying additional stimulus spending so as to create jobs and get us on a path to a 3+% economic growth rate would be strongly recommended.

Enacting those policies and governmental mandates quickly is the key to insuring our economy’s rebound and long-term success. Frankly, Mitt Romney has long figured this out and mapped out purposeful resolutions. I don’t think I can survive another 4 years of Obama, and am certain that our economy won’t.

I believe that I have said this before, but Romney's major problem is that he is really bad at politics. The fact that he is floundering on this issue is just par for the courses. His problem isn't flip-flopping (something that gets unnecessary bad press- changing your mind is ok), it is that he is an unbelievably bad flip-flopper.

President Obama revived the tax issue today, calling for a one-year extension of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts -- but only for the middle class.

In a White House ceremony, Obama said lower tax rates should end for Americans making more than $250,000 a year, citing the need to reduce the federal debt and invest it items such as education and infrastructure

When is President Obama going to lay out his plans for hope and change to improve the economy and stop attacking and blaming everyone else for his failures.

Three and half years is long enough to confirm he is an empty suit!
Unfortunately, a lot of people still don’t recognize a failure when they see it.

More tax increases to fund Obama's appetite for big government, what a surprise. This is a continuation of two tired, well-worn tropes of disingenuous Obama's propaganda.

American who isn't drinking Obama's cool-aid and has their blinders removed understands that the country's problems are rooted in obscene levels of spending, not under-taxation.

Hiking taxes merely allows communist-Democrats wiggle room to avoid making the hard and long-overdue choices to cut spending. It preserves the status quo of a government spending far, far beyond its means.

The top 20% of earners in this country are paying nearly half of federal income taxes. Meanwhile, nearly fifty percent of workers aren't paying any federal income tax. THAT'S fair? Give me a break.

Obama is a politician that is pander to any demographic needed to buy their votes. He wants the middle-class (whatever that means) dependent on the Federal Govt and to keep pulling the lever for the D candidate.
Sahit Muja
President and CEO
Albanian Minerals
New York

I'm with PW23. I have terrible grammar myself, so it makes me cringe when I read posts by people who are paid to write, and yet haven't mastered their given language.

IMHO (not that you care), if I can't trust someone to proofread their own post, I can't trust that they did the requisite fact checking necessary to write a properly substantiated article. Simple as that. It's the reason I don't visit CNN anymore (the difference being that I'm not paying CNN over $100 a year for my news, as I do The Economist).

Let me get this straight. You are a first-time poster, right? That means that, you took the trouble to get on one of the blogs to vent your spleen. Have I got it right so far? Then you suggest that The Economist hire you - or at least pay you for your ability (self-declared) to summarize an article in three sentences. To top it all off, you make repeated efforts to insult both the writer and the readers of this blog. I am a stoic, so it is beyond your ken to insult me. I am not sure whether you have a wicked sense of humor, or you are just wicked. Oh, and good luck with pretending to be reasonably intelligent. You will need it.

It is not just the Republicans in Congress that are giving Romney fits. The Republican Governors and Republican dominated Legislatures of twenty six states are giving him fits as well. The conservative movement within the Republican party may have very well set themselves up for a lose. PPACA looks and feels a lot like Massachusetts' health care legislation. And we all know who signed off on that piece of legislation.

Anderson, you're displaying Democratic Pavlovian Partisanship. You must have seen the Sunday morning round of talk shows.

When asked about the pathetically weak June Jobs report released on Friday, the DNC chairwoman mumbled that when the president first took office, the economy was hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month.

And then for some unknown reason she said, "I'd really like to see Mitt Romney release more than one year of tax records, because there's been disturbing reports [Washington Post] recently that he's got a Bermuda corporation, a secretive Bermuda corporation that no one knows anything about, investments in the Caymans, kind of Swiss bank account."

Meanwhile on another channel, former White House press secretary Roberts Gibbs tried to imply Romney's offshore money was illegal.

"Evolving" is something a candidate does before they run for a particular office. At the end of the "evolutionary" process, they then decide if they should run against the incumbent or not. However, once an announced-candidate changes their mind on a major issue, it probably should be considered flip-flopping. The amazing thing about the Romney campaign is that he decided to run against the incumbent partially (not completely, but partially) based on his dislike of a policy by the incumbent, i.e., the Affordable Care Act, that in many ways was a carbon copy of the policy he himself created. With that, I am not so sure the main concern is flip-flopping, but is about political opportunism on the part of the Romney campaign. Maybe he as a candidate what he says he stands for is indeed very different than the views of the current President and the Democratic party. However, his record as a politician in office in the State of Massachusetts suggests his policy views are very similar to the current President and the Democratic party.